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Current Events Knowledge Essay

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The purpose of this project was to determine people’s general knowledge of current events. High school students seemed like an interesting population to survey, with the goal of determining if political issues were important to them and how much they kept up with current events. Simply asking questions would have been too subjective, and thus an evaluation, done through a survey, of their knowledge would serve as a better indication of how important current events are to the average high school student. Other surveys regarding current events knowledge have been conducted, however that information may not be relevant to this particular experiment, given that the data sought for this study was the knowledge of current events among high schoolers …show more content…

After performing the test, a chi square value of 126.58 was determined. With a degrees of freedom value of 4, this constituted a p value of 2.101644 x 10-26. With an alpha level of .01, the null hypothesis was rejected. The study sought to determine the nature of current events knowledge for teenagers and prove that knowledge level was limited. Samples were taken from four high schools, but analyzed as one set of data. Through a chi squared statistical test, it was determined that knowledge level varied at a statistically significant level between questions. If knowledge level was independent of question, this outcome would have been highly unlikely. The number of students who said they did not know the answer of a question was in fact dependent upon the question asked. This suggests that teenage knowledge levels on current events issues may not be uniform, but related to the type of question or topic area. However, the questions themselves may have been somewhat poorly constructed and as such could have led respondents to select a certain answer choice, which limits applicability of the study. In addition, sampling methods and sample sizes varied between high schools, which means there may have been some underrepresentation and overrepresentation of certain groups. As such, while the study certainly could warrant further analysis of the issue, specific findings in this case may not be useful. Misleading questions and varied methodologies inhibit the work’s

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